There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.

–Oscar Wilde, “Preface”, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford TPoDG 1)

It has long been the practice of human beings to lay blame for any devastating incident at the feet of an outside source-in more recent times, everything from the comic books of the 1950s, to the music of Judas Priest and Marilyn Manson to movies such as Oliver Stone’s 1994, film Natural Born Killers has been blamed for the degradation of children, suicide, school shootings, and killing sprees. In fact, I believe it is so ingrained in the collective human psyche to repel anything that would make one take a closer look internally at underlying causes rather than simply focusing on the surface symptoms of an inherently larger issue, I would hardly be surprised to learn that an elder statesman, in response to the fall of Rome, was quoted as saying, “Damn those kids and their orgies!” As a result, the critical response to the 1890, publication of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippencott’s Monthly Magazine does not come as much of a surprise either (Wilde, Norton TPoDG 336). Indeed, a flippant and dismissive review of the novel by Samuel Henry Jeyes labels The Picture of Dorian Gray “stupid and vulgar” and states that “not wishing to offend the nostrils of decent persons” the novel will not be analyzed (Ellman, 303 / Wilde, Norton TPoDG 333). The subsequent tete-a-tete between Wilde and Jeyes over Wilde’s intentions for and Jeyes’s dismissal of the novel illustrates, between hurled insults from both parties, the debate that hasraged for centuries over the influence, or lack of as the case may be, art of any form has on the general populace.

At first glance, Wilde and Jeyes seem to belabor the same point: that The Picture of Dorian Gray is irrelevant. Jeyes deems it a novel packed with “esoteric prurience” that was written solely for shock value and therefore has no value (Wilde, Norton TPoDG 333). Wilde, for his part, argues that, because art and ethics are two distinct entities, The Picture of Dorian Gray cannot be critiqued from a moral perspective and further declares that, because he wrote the novel for no other amusement than his own, he is apathetic concerning its popularity (Wilde, Norton TPoDG 336). On the surface, there seems to be very little, if any, discrepancy to the overall point of both parties, but, as Wilde notes, Jeyes’s criticism of The Picture of Dorian Grayis based on a moral argument (Wilde, Norton TPoDG 336); a moral argument that is not only indicative of the social climate of the era, but which also firmly centers the sum of the debate around the question of whether the novel entertains certain aspects of the human condition that Jeyes considers unmentionable, namely “wickedness [and] filthiness” (335), and, by extension, whether art imitates life or if life imitates art; if, despite the assertion by both Jeyes and Wilde, the novel has no bearing on the lives of its readers and whether it is possible to be influenced by art in any form. It is interesting to note that reviews by literary critics such as Jeyes were firmly entrenched in the alleged depravity of the novel-and Wilde’s personal behavior-and were seemingly incapable of viewing what they felt objectionable in The Picture of Dorian Gray within a larger context. One such review refers to the moral of The Picture of Dorian Gray as, “when you feel yourself becoming too angelic you cannot do better than to rush out and make a beast of yourself” (Unknown 343).

It has been said that literary critics are simply frustrated writers; perhaps this explains the injudicious reaction by Jeyes and his contemporaries, or perhaps they simply saw too much of themselves in the character of Dorian Gray (Wilde, Norton TPoDG 347). This simplistic and unsophisticated perspective is never changing; in an article written by shock-rocker Marilyn Manson in response to the 1999, Columbine school shootings, he states, “America loves to find an icon to hang its guilt on” (Manson 2), and the same could be said of Victorian England, and Oscar Wilde, where repression stood center stage. That Wilde, despite his seemingly open demeanor about taboo subjects, suffered from his own “guilt and self-loathing” is hardly disputable (Carroll 288). Incidentally, Wilde’s more artistically inclined peers, by contrast, were quite capable of deciphering Wilde’s intentions with little doubt. In fact, a review by Walter Pater, from whom Wilde procured Lord Henry’s philosophy of “New Hedonism” (Carroll 287), is able to summarize the moral of The Picture of Dorian Gray thus: “his story is also a vivid, though carefully considered, exposure of the corruption of a soul, with a very plain moral pushed home, to the effect that vice and crime make people coarse and ugly” (354). I would venture to say that Pater’s assessment of the moral is a bit simplistic, but, while there was certainly enough repression on both sides, artists’ repression did not necessarily mean an inability to recognize elements that were considered unsavory by other less enlightened souls. And despite Wilde’s protestations that he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray solely for his own amusement, he was a voracious analyzer of not only his own behavior, but also the collective behavior of society as a whole (as seen throughout not only The Picture of Dorian Gray, but his other writings, as well), and he certainly had his own agenda. He also knew exactly what he was doing: his previous work, The Portrait of Mr. W.H., was consistently reissued with updates until his conviction in 1895, because he felt it the approach best suited to desensitize Victorian society to ideas that generally went against the collective sensibilities (Craft 119). As a result, his declaration that books are neither moral nor immoral, and therefore have no immediate effect on a reader, falls flat given that his most recognizable character, that of Dorian Gray, falls enamored with a book that further cements his-and coincidentally begins Wilde’s-fall from grace. In the era of Victorian England, what Jeyes refers to as “”frank Paganism” which delights in dirtiness and confesses its delight’” in The Picture of Dorian Gray (335), most certainly must have come as a shock to the sensibilities of the time, which were, if not completely, still intertwined with religion.

Indeed, Joyce Carol Oates’ reference to The Picture of Dorian Gray as “Wilde’s Parable of the Fall” is an apt description (419)-the novel is, in fact, the proverbial apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And once knowledge is obtained, the more the quest for knowledge must be followed, turning the circular pursuit into an endeavor to rival even the most vicious. Additionally, the “falls” associated with the novel are two-fold-one can easily surmise the correlation in a series of mathematical, albeit rudimentary, equations. We must begin, of course, with the Biblical Fall as our basis: Eve + Apple + Adam = Fall. By substituting characters from The Picture of Dorian Gray, the equation transforms to: Lord Henry (Eve) + Unnamed Book (Apple) + Dorian (Adam) = Fall. The equation can be taken one step further to read: Wilde (Eve) + TPoDG (Apple) + Reader (Adam) = Fall. Since Dorian Gray led others to their own falls, the equation can take additional forms. And if the critics were to be heeded, any person base enough to read The Picture of Dorian Gray-if his / her initial thirst for knowledge was quenched-was in grave danger of falling prey to its influence. In a twist of prophetic irony worthy of inclusion in any novel, however, Wilde wrote of his own fall from grace well before his novel was used against him in the infamous trial that brought about his ruin. Wilde’s pursuit of knowledge was already well ingrained by the time he began writing and it was this pursuit of knowledge that precipitated his downfall well before it actually occurred.